The school and society; being three lectures, supplemented by a statement of the University Elementary School

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THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

SCHOOL

amf

SOCIETY

BEINGTHREELECTURES

JOHN DEWEY

SUPPLEMENTED BY

A STATEMENT OF
THE UNIVERSITY
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

1 9 O 7 Q CHICAGO

THE UNIYERSITYOF CHICAGO PRESS

NEW OYORKO
M9CLURE, PHILLIPS & COMPANY

COPYRIGHT 1900 BY
JOHN DEWEY

FIRST EDITION 1,000 copies. Printed November, 1899.

SECOND IMPRESSION 1,500 copies. Printed February, 1900.

THIRD IMPRESSION 5,000 copies. Printed July, 1900.

FOURTH IMPRESSION i ,000 copies. Printed June, 1904.

FIFTH IMPRESSION 2,500 copies. Printed February, 1905.

SIXTH IMPRESSION 2,500 copies. Printed August, 1907.

Composed and Printed By

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago. Illinois. U. S. A.

TO
MRS. EMMONS ELAINE

TO WHOSE INTEREST IN EDUCATIONAL

REFORM

THE APPEARANCE OF THIS BOOK
IS DUE

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS . 19

II. THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE OF THE

CHILD 47

III. WASTE IN EDUCATION 77

IV. THREE YEARS OF THE UNIVERSITY

ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 113

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

DRAWING OF A CAVE AND TREES .... 56

DRAWING OF A FOREST 58

DRAWING OF HANDS SPINNING 60

DRAWING OF A GIRL SPINNING 62

PUBLISHER S NOTE

THE three lectures presented in the following
pages were delivered before an audience of
parents and others interested in the University
Elementary School, in the month of April of
the year 1899. Mr. Dewey revised them in
part from a stenographic report, and unimpor
tant changes and the slight adaptations neces
sary for the press have been made in his absence.
The lectures retain therefore the unstudied char
acter as well as the power of the spoken word.
As they imply more or less familiarity with
the work of the Elementary School, Mr. Dewey s
supplementary statement of this has been added.

AUTHOR S NOTE

A SECOND edition affords a grateful opportunity
for recalling that this little book is a sign of the
cooperating thoughts and sympathies of many
persons. Its indebtedness to Mrs. Emmons
Elaine is partly indicated in the dedication.
From my friends, Mr. and Mrs. George Herbert
Mead, came that interest, unflagging attention to
detail, and artistic taste which, in my absence,
remade colloquial remarks until they were fit to
print, and then saw the results through the press
with the present attractive result a mode of
authorship made easy, which I recommend to
others fortunate enough to possess such friends.

It would be an extended paragraph which
should list all the friends whose timely and per
sisting generosity has made possible the school
which inspired and defined the ideas of these
pages. These friends, I am sure, would be the
first to recognize the peculiar appropriateness of
especial mention of the names of Mrs. Charles R.
Crane and Mrs. William R. Linn.

And the school itself in its educational work is
a joint undertaking. Many have engaged in
shaping it. The clear and experienced intelli
gence of my wife is wrought everywhere into its

texture. The wisdom, tact and devotion of its
instructors have brought about a transformation
of its original amorphous plans into articulate
form and substance with life and movement of
their own. Whatever the issue of the ideas pre
sented in this book, the satisfaction coming from
the cooperation of the diverse thoughts and deeds
of many persons in undertaking to enlarge the
life of the child will abide.

January 5, 1900

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL
PROGRESS

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

We are apt to look at the school from an individu
alistic standpoint, as something between teacher
and pupil, or between teacher and parent. That
which interests us most is naturally the progress
made by the individual child of our acquaintance,
his normal physical development, his advance in
ability to read, write, and figure, his growth in
the knowledge of geography and history, im
provement in manners, habits of promptness,
order, and industry it is from such standards as
these that we judge the work of the school. And
rightly so. Yet the range of the outlook needs
to be enlarged. What the best and wisest parent
wants for his own child, that must the community
want for all of its children. Any other ideal for
our schools is narrow and unlovely ; acted upon,
it destroys our democracy. All that society has
accomplished for itself is put, through the agency
of the school, at the disposal of its future mem
bers. All its better thoughts of itself it hopes to
realize through the new possibilities thus opened
to its future self. ! Here individualism and social
ism are at one. Only by being true to the full
growth of all the individuals who make it up, can
19

20 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

society by any chance be true to itself. And in
the self-direction thus given, nothing counts as
much as the school, for, as Horace Mann said,
" Where anything is growing, one former is
worth a thousand re-formers."

Whenever we have in mind the discussion of
a new movement in education, it is especially
necessary to take the broader, or social view.
Otherwise, changes in the school institution and
tradition will be looked at as the arbitrary inven
tions of particular teachers ; at the worst transi
tory fads, and at the best merely improvements
in certain details and this is the plane upon
which it is too customary to consider school
changes. It is as rational to conceive of the
locomotive or the telegraph as personal devices.
The modification going on in the method and"*
curriculum of education is as much a product of
the changed social situation, and as much an effort
to meet the needs of the new society that, is j
forming, as are changes in modes of industry and
commerce.

It is to this, then, that I especially ask your
attention : the effort to conceive what roughly
may be termed the " New Education" in the
light of larger changes in society. Can we
connect this "New Education" with the general
march of events ? If we can, it will lose its iso
lated character, and will cease to be an affair which

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 21

proceeds only from the over-ingenious minds of
pedagogues dealing with particular pupils. It
will appear as part and parcel of the whole social
evolution, and, in its more general features at
least, as inevitable. Let us then ask after the main
aspects of the social movement ; and afterwards
turn to the school to find what witness it gives of
effort to put itself in line. And since it is quite
impossible to cover the whole ground, I shall for
the most part confine myself to one typical
thing in the modern school movement that
which passes under the name of manual training,
hoping if the relation of that to changed social
conditions appears, we shall be ready to concede
the point as well regarding other educational
innovations.

I make no apology for not dwelling at length
upon the social changes in question. Those I
shall mention are writ so large that he who runs
may read. The change that comes first to mind,
the one that overshadows and even controls all
others, is the industrial one the application of
science resulting in the great inventions that have
utilized the forces of nature on a vast and inex
pensive scale : the growth of a world-wide
market as the object of production, of vast
manufacturing centers to supply this market, of
cheap and rapid means of communication and
distribution between all its parts. Even as to its

22 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

feebler beginnings, this change is not much more
than a century old ; in many of its most impor
tant aspects it falls within the short span of those
now living. One can hardly believe there has
been a revolution in all history so rapid, so
extensive, so complete. Through it the face of
the earth is making over, even as to its physical
forms; political boundaries are wiped out and
moved about, as if they were indeed only lines
on a paper map ; population is hurriedly gathered
into cities from the ends of the earth ; habits of
living are altered with startling abruptness and
thoroughness ; the search for the truths of nature
is infinitely stimulated and facilitated and their
application to life made not only practicable,
but commercially necessary. Even our moral
and religious ideas and interests, the most con
servative because the deepest-lying things in
our nature, are profoundly affected. That this
revolution should not affect education in other
than formal and superficial fashion is inconceiv
able.

Back of the factory system lies the household
and neighborhood system. Those of us who
are here today need go back only one, two, or
at most three generations, to find a time when
the household was practically the center in which
were carried on, or about which were clustered,
all the typical forms of industrial occupation.

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 23

The clothing worn was for the most part not only
made in the house, but the members of the house
hold were usually familiar with the shearing of
the sheep, the carding and spinning of the wool,
and the plying of the loom. Instead of pressing
a button and flooding the house with electric
light, the whole process of getting illumination
was followed in its toilsome length, from the
killing of the animal and the trying of fat, to the
making of wicks and dipping of candles. The
supply of flour, of lumber, of foods, of building
materials, of household furniture, even of metal
ware, of nails, hinges, hammers, etc., was in the
immediate neighborhood, in shops which were
constantly open to inspection and often centers
of neighborhood congregation. The entire in
dustrial process stood revealed, from the produc
tion on the farm of the raw materials, till the
finished article was actually put to use. Not
only this, but practically every member of the
household had his own share in the work. The
children, as they gained in strength and capacity,
were gradually initiated into the mysteries of the
several processes. It was a matter of immediate
and personal concern, even to the point of actual
participation.

We cannot overlook the factors of discipline
and of character-building involved in this : train
ing in habits of order and of industry, and in

24 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do
something, to produce something, in the world.
There was always something which really
needed to be done, and a real necessity that each
member of the household should do his own part
faithfully and in cooperation with others. Person
alities which became effective in action were bred
and tested in the medium of action. Again, we
cannot overlook the importance for educational
purposes of the close and intimate acquaintance
got with nature at first hand, with real things and
materials, with the actual processes of their manip
ulation, and the knowledge of their social neces
sities and uses. In all this there was continual
training of observation, of ingenuity, constructive
imagination, of logical thought, and of the sense
of reality acquired through first-hand contact with
actualities. The educative forces of the domestic
spinning and weaving, of the saw-mill, the grist
mill, the cooper shop, and the blacksmith forge,
were continuously operative.

No number of object-lessons, got up as object-
lessons for the sake of giving information, can
afford even the shadow of a substitute for ac
quaintance with the plants and animals of the
farm and garden, acquired through actual living
among them and caring for them. No training of
sense-organs in school, introduced for the sake of
training, can begin to compete with the alertness

*

THE SCHQQL AND SOCIETY 25

and fullness of sense-life thafcomes through daily
intimacy and interest in familiar occupations.
Verbal memory can be trained in committing
tasks, a certain discipline of the reasoning
powers can be acquired through lessons in sci
ence and mathematics ; but, after all, this is
somewhat remote and shadowy compared with
the training of attention and of judgment that is
acquired in having to do things with a real motive
behind and a real outcome ahead. At present,
concentration of industry and division of labor
have practically eliminated household and neigh
borhood occupations at least for educational pur
poses. But it is useless to bemoan the departure
of the good old days of children s modesty, rever
ence, and implicit obedience, if we expect merely
by bemoaning and by exhortation to bring them
back. It is radical conditions which have
changed, and only an equally radical change in
education suffices. We must recognize our com
pensations the increase in toleration, in breadth
of social judgment, the larger acquaintance with
human nature, the sharpened alertness in reading
signs of character and interpreting social situa
tions, greater accuracy of adaptation to differing
personalities, contact with greater commercial
activities. These considerations mean much to
the city-bred child of today. Yet there is a real
problem : how shall we retain these advantages,

26 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

and yet introduce into the school something rep
resenting the other side of life occupations
which exact personal responsibilities and which
train the child with relation to the physical reali
ties of life ?

When we turn to the school, we find that one
of the most striking tendencies at present is
toward the introduction of so-called manual
training, shop-work, and the household arts
sewing and cooking.

This has not been done "on purpose," with a
full consciousness that the school must now sup
ply that factor of training formerly taken care of
in the home, but rather by instinct, by experiment
ing and finding that such work takes a vital hold
of pupils and gives them something which was not
to be got in any other way. Consciousness of its
real import is still so weak that the work is often
done in a half-hearted, confused, and unrelated way.
The reasons assigned to justify it are painfully
inadequate or sometimes even positively wrong.

If we were to cross-examine even those who are
most favorably disposed to the introduction of
this work into our school system, we should,
I imagine, generally find the main reasons to be
that such work engages the full spontaneous inter
est and attention of the children. It keeps them
alert and active, instead of passive and receptive ;
it makes them more useful, more capable, and

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 27

hence more inclined to be helpful at home ; it
prepares them to some extent for the practical
duties of later life the girls to be more efficient
house managers, if not actually cooks and semp
stresses ; the boys (were our educational system
only adequately rounded out into trade schools)
for their future vocations. I do not underesti
mate the worth of these reasons. Of those indi
cated by the changed attitude of the children I
shall indeed have something to say in my next talk,
when speaking directly of the relationship of the
school to the child. But the point of view is,
upon the whole, unnecessarily narrow. We must
conceive of work in wood and metal, of weaving,
sewing, and cooking, as methods of life not as
distinct studies.

We must conceive of them in their social signifi
cance, as types of the processes by which society
keeps itself going, as agencies for bringing home
to the child some of the primal necessities of com
munity life, and as ways in which these needs have
been met by the growing insight and ingenuity of
man ; in short, as instrumentalities through which
the school itself shall be made a genuine form of
active community life, instead of a place set apart
in which to learn lessons.

A society is a number of people held together
because they are working along common lines, in
a common spirit, and with reference to common

28 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

aims. The common needs and aims demand a
growing interchange of thought and growing
unity of sympathetic feeling. The radical reason
that the present school cannot organize itself
as a natural social unit is because just this ele
ment of common and productive activity is ab
sent. Upon the playground, in game and sport,
social organization takes place spontaneously and
inevitably. There :s something to do, some
activity to be carried on, requiring natural divi
sions of labor, selection of leaders and followers,
mutual cooperation and emulation. In the
schoolroom the motive and the cement of social
organization are alike wanting. Upon the ethical
side, the tragic weakness of the present school is
that it endeavors to prepare future members of
the social order in a medium in which the condi
tions of the social spirit are eminently wanting.
The difference that appears when occupations
are made the articulating centers of school life is
not easy to describe in words ; it is a difference
in motive, of spirit and atmosphere. As one
enters a busy kitchen in which a group of
children are actively engaged in the preparation
of food, the psychological difference, the change
from more or less passive and inert recipiency
and restraint to one of buoyant outgoing energy,
is so obvious as fairly to strike one in the face.
Indeed, to those whose image of the school is

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 29

rigidly set the change is sure to give a shock.
But the change in the social attitude is equally
marked. The mere absorption of facts and
truths is so exclusively individual an affair that
it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness.
There is no obvious social motive for the
acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear
social gain in success thereat. Indeed, almost
the only measure for success is a competitive
one, in the bad sense of that term a compari
son of results in the recitation or in the exami
nation to see which child has succeeded in
getting ahead of others in storing up, in accumu
lating the maximum of information. So thor
oughly is this the prevalent atmosphere that for
one child to help another in his task has become
a school crime. Where the school work consists
in simply learning lessons, mutual assistance,
instead of being the most natural form of coop
eration and association, becomes a clandestine
effort to relieve one s neighbor of his proper
duties. Where active work is going on all this is
changed. Helping others, instead of being a
form of charity which impoverishes the recipient,
is simply an aid in setting free the powers and
furthering the impulse of the one helped. A
spirit of free communication, of interchange of
ideas, suggestions, results, both successes and
failures of previous experiences, becomes the

30 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

dominating note of the recitation. So far as
emulation enters in, it is in the comparison of
individuals, not with regard to the quantity of
information personally absorbed, but with refer
ence to the quality of work done the genuine
community standard of value. In an informal
but all the more pervasive way, the school life
organizes itself on a social basis.

Within this organization is found the principle
of school discipline or order. Of course, order
is simply a thing which is relative to an end. If
you have the end in view of forty or fifty
children learning certain set lessons, to be
recited to a teacher, your discipline must be
devoted to securing that result. But if the end
in view is the development of a spirit of social
cooperation and community life, discipline must
grow out of and be relative to this. There is
little order of one sort where things are in
process of construction ; there is a certain
disorder in any busy workshop ; there is not
silence ; persons are not engaged in maintaining
certain fixed physical postures; their arms are not
folded ; they are not holding their books thus
and so. They are doing a variety of things, and
\ . there is the confusion, the bustle, that results
; from activity. But out of occupation, out of
doing things that are to produce results, and out
of doing these in a social and cooperative way,

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 31

there is born a discipline of its own kind and
type. Our whole conception of school discipline
changes when we get this point of view. In
critical moments we all realize that the only
discipline that stands by us, the only training that
becomes intuition, is that got through life itself.
That we learn from experience, and from books
or the sayings of others only as they are related
to experience, are not mere phrases. But the
school has been so set apart, so isolated from
the ordinary conditions and motives of life, that
the place where children are sent for discipline
is the one place in the world where it is most
difficult to get experience the mother of all
discipline worth the name. . It is only where a
narrow and fixed image of traditional school
discipline dominates, that one is in any danger of
overlooking that deeper and infinitely wider disci
pline that comes from having a part to do in con
structive work, in contributing to a result which,
social in spirit, is none the less obvious and tangi
ble in form and hence in a form with reference
to which responsibility may be exacted and accu
rate judgment passed.

The great thing to keep in mind, then, regard
ing the introduction into the school of various
forms of active occupation, is that through them
the entire spirit of the school is renewed. It has
a chance to affiliate itself with life, to become the

32 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

child s habitat, where he learns through directed
living; instead of being only a place to learn
lessons having an abstract and remote refer
ence to some possible living to be done in the
future. It gets a chance to be a miniature com
munity, an embryonic society. This is the funda
mental fact, and from this arise continuous and
orderly sources of instruction. Under the industrial
regime described, the child, after all, shared in the
work, not for the sake of the sharing, but for the
sake of the product. The educational results se
cured were real, yet incidental and dependent.
But in the school the typical occupations followed
are freed from all economic stress. The aim is
not the economic value of the products, but the
development of social power and insight. It is
this liberation from narrow utilities, this openness
to the possibilities of the human spirit that makes
these practical activities in the school allies of
art and centers of science and history.

The unity of all the sciences is found in geog
raphy. The significance of geography is that it
presents the earth as the enduring home of the
occupations of man. The world without its rela
tionship to human activity is less than a world.
Human industry and achievement, apart from their
roots in the earth, are not even a sentiment, hardly
a name. The earth is the final source of all man s
food. It is his continual shelter and protection,

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 33

the raw material of all his activities, and the
home to whose humanizing and idealizing all his
achievement returns. It is the great field, the
great mine, the great source of the energies of
heat, light, and electricity ; the great scene of
ocean, stream, mountain, and plain, of which all
our agriculture and mining and lumbering, all our
manufacturing and distributing agencies, are but
the partial elements and factors. It is through
occupations determined by this environment that
mankind has made its historical and political
progress. It is through these occupations that the
intellectual and emotional interpretation of nature
has been developed. It is through what we do
in and with the world that we read its meaning
and measure its value.

In educational terms, this means that these
occupations in the school shall not be mere prac
tical devices or modes of routine employment,
the gaining of better technical skill as cooks,
sempstresses, or carpenters, but active centers of
scientific insight into natural materials and pro
cesses, points of departure whence children shall
be led out into a realization of the historic de
velopment of man. The actual significance of
this can be told better through one illustration
taken from actual school work than by general
discourse.

There is nothing which strikes more oddly upon

34 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

the average intelligent visitor than to see boys as
well as girls of ten, twelve, and thirteen years of
age engaged in sewing and weaving. If we look
at this from the standpoint of preparation of the
boys for sewing on buttons and making patches,
we get a narrow and utilitarian conception a
basis that hardly justifies giving prominence to
this sort of work in the school. But if we look
at it from another side, we find that this work
gives the point of departure from which the child
can trace and follow the progress of mankind in
history, getting an insight also into the materials
used and the mechanical principles involved. In
connection with these occupations, the historic
development of man is recapitulated. For exam
ple, the children are first given the raw material
the flax, the cotton plant, the wool as it comes
from the back of the sheep (if we could take them
to the place where the sheep are sheared, so much
the better). Then a study is made of these ma
terials from the standpoint of their adaptation to
the uses to which they may be put. For instance,
a comparison of the cotton fiber with wool fiber is
made. I did not know until the children told
me, that the reason for the late development of
the cotton industry as compared with the woolen
is, that the cotton fiber is so very difficult to free
by hand from the seeds. The children in one
group worked thirty minutes freeing cotton fibers

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 35

from the boll and seeds, and succeeded in get
ting out less than one ounce. They could
easily believe that one person could only gin
one pound a day by hand, and could under
stand why their ancestors wore woolen instead
of cotton clothing. Among other things dis
covered as affecting their relative utilities, was
the shortness of the cotton fiber as compared with
that of wool, the former being one-tenth of an
inch in length, while that of the latter is an inch
in length ; also that the fibers of cotton are smooth
and do not cling together, while the wool has a
certain roughness which makes the fibers stick, thus
assisting the spinning. The children worked this
out for themselves with the actual material, aided
by questions and suggestions from the teacher.

They then followed the processes necessary for
working the fibers up into cloth. They re-invented
the first frame for carding the wool a couple of
boards with sharp pins in them for scratching it
out. They re-devised the simplest process for
spinning the wool a pierced stone or some
other weight through which the wool is passed,
and which as it is twirled draws out the fiber;
next the top, which was spun on the floor, while
the children kept the wool in their hands until
it was gradually drawn out and wound upon
it. Then the children are introduced to the in
vention next in historic order, working it out

36 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

experimentally, thus seeing its necessity, and
tracing its effects, not only upon that particular
industry, but upon modes of social life in this
way passing in review the entire process up to
the present complete loom, and all that goes with
the application of science in the use of our pres
ent available powers. I need not speak of the
science involved in this the study of the fibers,
of geographical features, the conditions under
which raw materials are grown, the great centers
of manufacture and distribution, the physics
involved in the machinery of production ; nor,
again, of the historical side the influence which
these inventions have had upon humanity. You
can concentrate the history of all mankind into
the evolution of the flax, cotton, and wool fibers
into clothing. I do not mean that this is the
only, or the best, center. But it is true that
certain very real and important avenues to the
consideration of the history of the race are thus
opened that the mind is introduced to much
more fundamental and controlling influences than
usually appear in the political and chronological
records that pass for history.

Now, what is true of this one instance of fibers
used in fabrics (and, of course, I have only
spoken of one or two elementary phases of that)
is true in its measure of every material used in
every occupation, and of the processes employed.

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 37

The occupation supplies the child with a genuine
motive; it gives him experience at first hand;
it brings him into contact with realities. It does
all this, but in addition it is liberalized through
out by translation into its historic values and
scientific equivalencies. With the growth of the
child s mind in power and knowledge it ceases to
be a pleasant occupation merely, and becomes
more and more a medium, an instrument, an
organ and is thereby transformed.

This, in turn, has its bearing upon the teaching
of science. Under present conditions, all activity,
to be successful, has to be directed somewhere
and somehow by the scientific expert it is a
case of applied science. This connection should
determine its place in education. It is not only
that the occupations, the so-called manual or
industrial work in the school, give the oppor
tunity for the introduction of science which
illuminates them, which makes them material,
freighted with meaning, instead of being mere
devices of hand and eye ; but that the scientific
insight thus gained becomes an indispensable
instrument of free and active participation in
modern social life. Plato somewhere speaks of
the slave as one who in his actions does not
express his own ideas, but those of some other
man. It is our social problem now, even more
urgent than in the time of Plato, that method,

38 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

purpose, understanding, shall exist in the con
sciousness of the one who does the work, that
his activity shall have meaning to himself.

When occupations in the school are conceived
in this broad and generous way, I can only stand
lost in wonder at the objections so often heard,
that such occupations are out of place in the
school because they are materialistic, utilitarian,
or even menial in their tendency. It sometimes
seems to me that those who make these objections
must live in quite another world. The world in
which most of us live is a world in which every
one has a calling and occupation, something to
do. Some are managers and others are sub
ordinates. But the great thing for one as for
the other is that each shall have had the educa
tion which enables him to see within his daily work
all there is in it of large and human significance.
How many of the employed are today mere
appendages to the machines which they operate !
This may be due in part to the machine itself, or
to the regime which lays so much stress upon the
products of the machine ; but it is certainly due
in large part to the fact that the worker has had
no opportunity to develop his imagination and his
sympathetic insight as to the social and scientific
values found in his work. At present, the impulses
which lie at the basis of the industrial system are
either practically neglected or positively distorted

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 39

during the school period. Until the instincts of
construction and production are systematically
laid hold of in the years of childhood and youth,
until they are trained in social directions, enriched
by historical interpretation, controlled and illu
minated by scientific methods, we certainly are in
no position even to locate the source of our eco
nomic evils, much less to deal with them effectively.
If we go back a few centuries, we find a prac
tical monopoly of learning. . The term possession
of learning was, indeed, a happy one. Learning
was a class matter. This was a necessary result
of social conditions. There were not in existence
any means by which the multitude could possibly
have access to intellectual resources. These were
stored up and hidden away in manuscripts. Of
these there were at best only a few, and it re
quired long and toilsome preparation to be able
to do anything with them. A high-priesthood of
learning, which guarded the treasury of truth and
which doled it out to the masses under severe re
strictions, was the inevitable expression of these
conditions. But, as a direct result of the indus
trial revolution of which we have been speaking,
this has been changed. Printing was invented ;
it was made commercial. Books, magazines,
papers were multiplied and cheapened. As a
result of the locomotive and telegraph, fre
quent, rapid, and cheap intercommunication by

40 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

mails and electricity was called into being.
Travel has been rendered easy ; freedom of move
ment, with its accompanying exchange of ideas,
indefinitely facilitated. The result has been an
intellectual revolution. Learning has been put
into circulation. While there still is, and prob
ably always will be, a particular class having the
special business of inquiry in hand, a distinctively
learned class is henceforth out of the question.
It is an anachronism. Knowledge is no longer an
immobile solid ; it has been liquefied. It is active
ly moving in all the currents of society itself.

It is easy to see that this revolution, as regards
the materials of knowledge, carries with it a
marked change in the attitude of the individual.
Stimuli of an intellectual sort pour in upon us in
all kinds of ways. The merely intellectual life,
the life of scholarship and of learning, thus gets a
very altered value. Academic and scholastic,
instead of being titles of honor, are becoming
terms of reproach.

But all this means a necessary change in the
attitude of the school, one of which we are as
yet far from realizing the full force. Our school
methods, and to a very considerable extent our
curriculum, are inherited from the period when
learning and command of certain symbols, afford
ing as they did the only access to learning, were
all-important. The ideals of this period are still

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 41

largely in control, even where the outward meth
ods and studies have been changed. We some
times hear the introduction of manual training,
art and science into the elementary, and even the
secondary schools, deprecated on the ground that
they tend toward the production of specialists
that they detract from our present scheme of
generous, liberal culture. The point of this ob
jection would be ludicrous if it were not often so
effective as to make it tragic. It is our present
education which is highly specialized, one-sided
and narrow. It is an education dominated almost
entirely by the mediaeval conception of learning.
It is something which appeals for the most part
simply to the intellectual aspect of our natures,
our desire to learn, to accumulate information,
and to get control of the symbols of learning ;
not to our impulses and tendencies to make, to
do, to create, to produce, whether in the form
of utility or of art. The very fact that manual
training, art and science are objected to as tech
nical, as tending toward mere specialism, is of
itself as good testimony as could be offered to
the specialized aim which controls current edu
cation. Unless education had been virtually iden
tified with the exclusively intellectual pursuits,
with learning as such, all these materials and
methods would be welcome, would be greeted
with the utmost hospitality.

42 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

While training for the profession of learning
is regarded as the type of culture, as a liberal
education, that of a mechanic, a musician, a
lawyer, a doctor, a farmer, a merchant, or a
railroad manager is regarded as purely technical
and professional. The result is that which we
see about us everywhere the division into " cul
tured " people and " workers," the separation of
theory and practice. Hardly one per cent, of
the entire school population ever attains to what
we call higher education ; only five per cent, to
the grade of our high school ; while much more
than half leave on or before the completion of
the fifth year of the elementary grade. The sim
ple facts of the case are that in the great major
ity of human beings the distinctively intellectual
interest is not dominant. They have the so-called
practical impulse and disposition. In many of those
in whom by nature intellectual interest is strong,
social conditions prevent its adequate realization.
Consequently by far the larger number of pupils
leave school as soon as they have acquired the
rudiments of learning, as soon as they have enough
of the symbols of reading, writing, and calcula
ting to be of practical use to them in getting a
living. While our educational leaders are talk
ing of culture, the development of personality,
etc., as the end and aim of education, the great
majority of those who pass under the tuition of

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 43

the school regard it only as a narrowly practical
tool with which to get bread and butter enough
to eke out a restricted life. If we were to con
ceive our educational end and aim in a less
exclusive way, if we were to introduce into edu
cational processes the activities which appeal to
those whose dominant interest is to do and to
make, we should find the hold of the school upon
its members to be more vital, more prolonged,
containing more of culture.

But why should I make this labored presenta
tion ? The obvious fact is that our social life has
undergone a thorough and radical change. If
our education is to have any meaning for life,
it must pass through an equally complete trans
formation. This transformation is not something
to appear suddenly, to be executed in a day by
conscious purpose. It is already in progress.
Those modifications of our school system which
often appear (even to those most actively con
cerned with them, to say nothing of their specta
tors) to be mere changes of detail, mere improve
ment within the school mechanism, are in reality
signs and evidences of evolution. The intro
duction of active occupations, of nature study,
of elementary science, of art, of history ; the
relegation of the merely symbolic and formal to
a secondary position ; the change in the moral
school atmosphere, in the relation of pupils and

44 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

teachers of discipline ; the introduction of more
active, expressive, and self-directing factors all
these are not mere accidents, they are necessi
ties of the larger social evolution. It remains
but to organize all these factors, to appreciate
them in their fullness of meaning, and to put the
ideas and ideals involved into complete, uncom
promising possession of our school system. To
do this means to make each one of our schools
an embryonic community life, active with types
of occupations that reflect the life of the larger
society, and permeated throughout with the
spirit of art, history, and science. When the
school introduces and trains each child of society
into membership within such a little community,
saturating him with the spirit of service, and pro
viding him with the instruments of effective self-
direction, we shall have the deepest and best
guarantee of a larger society which is worthy,
lovely, and harmonious.

THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE
OF THE CHILD

II

THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE OF THE
CHILD

Last week I tried to put before you the rela
tionship between the school and the larger life
of the community, and the necessity for certain
changes in the methods and materials of school
work, that it might be better adapted to present
social needs.

Today I wish to look at the matter from the
other side, and consider the relationship of the
school to the life and development of the chil
dren in the school. As it is difficult to connect
general principles with such thoroughly concrete
things as little children, I have taken the liberty
of introducing a good deal of illustrative matter
from the work of the University Elementary
School, that in some measure you may appreciate
the way in which the ideas presented work them
selves out in actual practice.

Some few years ago I was looking about the
school supply stores in the city, trying to find
desks and chairs which seemed thoroughly suit
able from all points of view artistic, hygienic,
and educational to the needs of the children.
We had a good deal of difficulty in finding what
47

48 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

we needed, and finally one dealer, more intelligent
than the rest, made this remark : " I am afraid
we have not what you want. You want some
thing at which the children may work ; these are
all for listening." That tells the story of the tra-
ditional education. Just as the biologist can take
a bone or two and reconstruct the whole animal,
so, if we put before the mind s eye the ordinary
schoolroom, with its rows of ugly desks placed in
geometrical order, crowded together so that there
shall be as little moving room as possible, desks
almost all of the same size, with just space enough
to hold books, pencils and paper, and add a table,
some chairs, the bare walls, and possibly a few pic
tures, we can reconstruct the only educational
activity that can possibly go on in such a place.
It is all made " for listening" for simply study
ing lessons out of a book is only another kind of
listening; it marks the dependency of one mind
upon another. The attitude of listening means,
comparatively speaking, passivity, absorption ;
that there are certain ready-made materials which
are there, which have been prepared by the school
superintendent, the board, the teacher, and of
which the child is to take in as much as possible
in the least possible time.

There is very little place in the traditional
schoolroom for the child to work. The workshop,
the laboratory, the materials, the tools with which

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 49

the child may construct, create, and actively in
quire, and even the requisite space, have been for
the most part lacking. The things that have to
do with these processes have not even a definitely
recognized place in education. They are what the
educational authorities who write editorials in the
daily papers generally term " fads " and "frills."
A lady told me yesterday that she had been
visiting different schools trying to find one where
activity on the part of the children preceded
the giving of information on the part of the
teacher, or where the children had some motive
for demanding the information. She visited,
she said, twenty-four different schools before she
found her first instance. I may add that that was
not in this city.

Another thing that is suggested by these school
rooms, with their set desks, is that everything is
arranged for handling as large numbers of chil
dren as possible; for dealing with children en masse,
as an aggregate of units ; involving, again, that
they be treated passively. The moment children
act they individualize themselves ; they cease to
be a mass, and become the intensely distinctive
beings that we are acquainted with out of school,
in the home, the family, on the playground, and
in the neighborhood.

On the same basis is explicable the uniformity
of method and curriculum. If everything is on

50 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

a "listening" basis, you can have uniformity of
material and method. The ear, and the book
which reflects the ear, constitute the medium
which is alike for all. There is next to no oppor
tunity for adjustment to varying capacities and
demands. There is a certain amount a fixed
quantity of ready-made results and accomplish
ments to be acquired by all children alike in a
given time. It is in response to this demand
that the curriculum has been developed from the
elementary school up through the college. There
is just so much desirable knowledge, and there
are just so many needed technical accomplish
ments in the world. Then comes the mathe
matical problem of dividing this by the six,
twelve, or sixteen years of school life. Now
give the children every year just the proportion
ate fraction of the total, and by the time they have
finished they will have mastered the whole. By
covering so much ground during this hour or day
or week or year, everything comes out with per
fect evenness at the end provided the children
have not forgotten what they have previously
learned. The outcome of all this is Matthew
Arnold s report of the statement, proudly made
to him by an educational authority in France, that
so many thousands of children were studying at a
given hour, say eleven o clock, just such a lesson
in geography ; and in one of our own western

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 51

cities this proud boast used to be repeated to
successive visitors by its superintendent.

I may have exaggerated somewhat in order to
make plain the typical points of the old education :
its passivity of attitude, its mechanical massing of
children, its uniformity of curriculum and method.
It may be summed up by stating that the center of
gravity is outside the child. It is in the teacher,
the text-book, anywhere and everywhere you
please except in the immediate instincts and ac
tivities of the child himself. On that basis there
is not much to be said about the life of the child.
A good deal might be said about the studying of
the child, but the school is not the place where
the child lives. Now the change which is com
ing into our education is the shifting of the cen
ter of gravity. It is a change, a revolution, not
unlike that introduced by Copernicus when the
astronomical center shifted from the earth to
the sun. In this case the child becomes the sun
about which the appliances of education revolve;
he is the center about which they are organized.

If we take an example from an ideal home,
where the parent is intelligent enough to recognize
what is best for the child, and is able to supply
what is needed, we find the child learning
through the social converse and constitution of
the family. There are certain points of interest
and value to him in the conversation carried on :

52 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

statements are made, inquiries arise, topics are
discussed, and the child continually learns. He
states his experiences, his misconceptions are cor
rected. Again the child participates in the house
hold occupations, and thereby gets habits of
industry, order, and regard for the rights and
ideas of others, and the fundamental habit of sub
ordinating his activities to the general interest of
the household. Participation in these household
tasks becomes an opportunity for gaining knowl
edge. The ideal home would naturally have a
workshop where the child could work out his
constructive instincts. It would have a min
iature laboratory in which his inquiries could
be directed. The life of the child would extend
out of doors to the garden, surrounding fields,
and forests. He would have his excursions, his
walks and talks, in which the larger world out of
doors would open to him.

Now, if we organize and generalize all of this,
we have the ideal school. There is no mystery
about it, no wonderful discovery of pedagogy or
educational theory. It is simply a question of do
ing systematically and in a large, intelligent, and
competent way what for various reasons can be
done in most households only in a comparatively
meager and haphazard manner. In the first place,
the ideal home has to be enlarged. The child
must be brought into contact with more grown

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 53

people and with more children in order that there
may be the freest and richest social life. More
over, the occupations and relationships of the
home environment are not specially selected for
the growth of the child ; the main object is some
thing else, and what the child can get out of them
is incidental. Hence the need of a school. In
this school the life of the child becomes the all-
controlling aim. All the media necessary to fur
ther the growth of the child center there. Learn
ing? certainly, but living primarily, and learning
through and in relation to this living. When we
take the life of the child centered and organized
in this way, we do not find that he is first of all a
listening being; quite the contrary.

The statement so frequently made that educa
tion means " drawing out " is excellent, if we mean
simply to contrast it with the process of pouring
in. But, after all, it is difficult to connect the idea
of drawing out with the ordinary doings of the
child of three, four, seven, or eight years of age.
He is already running over, spilling over, with
activities of all kinds. He is not a purely latent
being whom the adult has to approach with great
caution and skill in order gradually to draw out
some hidden germ of activity. The child is already
intensely active, and the question of education is
the question of taking hold of his activities, of
giving them direction. Through direction, through

54 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

organized use, they tend toward valuable results,
instead of scattering or being left to merely
impulsive expression.

If we keep this before us, the difficulty I find
uppermost in the minds of many people regard
ing what is termed the new education is not so
much solved as dissolved ; it disappears. A ques
tion often asked is : if you begin with the child s
ideas, impulses and interests, all so crude, so
random and scattering, so little refined or spiritu
alized, how is he going to get the necessary dis
cipline, culture and information ? If there were
no way open to us except to excite and indulge
these impulses of the child, the question might
well be asked. We should either have to ignore
and repress the activities, or else to humor them.
But if we have organization of equipment and of
materials, there is another path open to us. We
can direct the child s activities, giving them exer
cise along certain lines, and ean thus lead up to
the goal which logically stands at the end of
the paths followed.

" If wishes were horses, beggars would ride."
Since they are not, since really to satisfy an
impulse or interest means to work it out, and work
ing it out involves running up against obstacles,
becoming acquainted with materials, exercising
ingenuity, patience, persistence, alertness, it of
necessity involves discipline ordering of power

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 55

and supplies knowledge. Take the example
of the little child who wants to make a box. If
he stops short with the imagination or wish, he
certainly will not get discipline. But when he
attempts to realize his impulse, it is a question of
making his idea definite, making it into a plan, of
taking the right kind of wood, measuring the
parts needed, giving them the necessary propor
tions, etc. There is involved the preparation of
materials, the sawing, planing, the sand-papering,
making all the edges and corners to fit. Knowl
edge of tools and processes is inevitable. If the
child realizes his instinct and makes the box, there
is plenty of opportunity to gain discipline and
perseverance, to exercise effort in overcoming
obstacles, and to attain as well a great deal of
information.

So undoubtedly the little child who thinks he
would like to cook has little idea of what it
means or costs, or what it requires. It is simply
a desire to " mess around," perhaps to imitate
the activities of older people. And it is doubt
less possible to let ourselves down to that level
and simply humor that interest. But here, too,
if the impulse is exercised, utilized, it runs up
against the actual world of hard conditions, to
which it must accommodate itself ; and there
again come in the factors of discipline and knowl
edge. One of the children became impatient

56 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

recently, at having to work things out by a long
method of experimentation, and said: "Why do
we bother with this ? Let s follow a recipe in
a cook-book." The teacher asked the children
where the recipe came from, and the conversation
showed that if they simply followed this they
would not understand the reasons for what they
were doing. They were then quite willing to go
on with the experimental work. To follow that
work will, indeed, give an illustration of just the
point in question. Their occupation happened
that day to be the cooking of eggs, as making a
transition from the cooking of vegetables to that
of meats. In order to get a basis of comparison
they first summarized the constituent food elements
in the vegetables and made a preliminary compari
son with those found in meat. Thus they found
that the woody fiber or cellulose in vegetables cor
responded to the connective tissue in meat, giving
the element of form and structure. They found
that starch and starchy products were character
istic of the vegetables, that mineral salts were
found in both alike, and that there was fat in
both a small quantity in vegetable food and a
large amount in animal. They were prepared
then to take up the study of albumen as the
characteristic feature of animal food, correspond
ing to starch in the vegetables, and were ready
to consider the conditions requisite for the proper

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 57

treatment of albumen the eggs serving as the
material of experiment.

They experimented first by taking water at
various temperatures, finding out when it was
scalding, simmering, and boiling hot, and ascer
tained the effect of the various degrees of tem
perature on the white of the egg. That worked
out, they were prepared, not simply to cook
eggs, but to understand the principle involved
in the cooking of eggs. I do not wish to lose
sight of the universal in the particular incident.
For the child simply to desire to cook an egg,
and accordingly drop it in water for three min
utes, and take it out when he is told, is not edu
cative. But for the child to realize his own
impulse by recognizing the facts, materials and
conditions involved, and then to regulate his
impulse through that recognition, is educative.
This is the difference, upon which I wish to insist,
between exciting or indulging an interest and
realizing it through its direction.

Another instinct of the child is the use of
pencil and paper. All children like to express
themselves through the medium of form and
color. If you simply indulge this interest by
letting the child go on indefinitely, there is no
growth that is more than accidental. But let the
child first express his impulse, and then through
criticism, question, and suggestion bring him to

58 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

consciousness of what he has done, and what he
needs to do, and the result is quite different.
Here, for example, is the work of a seven-year-old
child. It is not average work, it is the best work
done among the little children, but it illustrates
the particular principle of which I have been
speaking. They had been talking about the
primitive conditions of social life when people
lived in caves. The child s idea of that found
expression in this way : the cave is neatly set up
on the hill side in an impossible way. You see
the conventional tree of childhood ; a vertical
line with horizontal branches on each side. If
the child had been allowed to go on repeating
this sort of thing day by day, he would be indulg
ing his instinct rather than exercising it. But
the child was now asked to look closely at trees,
to compare those seen with the one drawn, to
examine more closely and consciously into the
conditions of his work. Then he drew trees from
observation.

Finally he drew again from combined observa
tion, memory, and imagination. He made again
a free illustration, expressing his own imaginative
thought, but controlled by detailed study of
actual trees. The result was a scene representing
a bit of forest ; so far as it goes, it seems to me
to have as much poetic feeling as the work of an
adult, while at the same time its trees are, in

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 59

their proportions possible ones, not mere sym
bols.

If we roughly classify the impulses which are
available in the school, we may group them
under four heads. There is the social instinct of
the children as shown in conversation, personal
intercourse, and communication. We all know
how self-centered the little child is at the age of
four or five. If any new subject is brought up,
if he says anything at all, it is: "I have seen
that;" or, "My papa or mamma told me about
that." His horizon is not large ; an experience
must come immediately home to him, if he is to
be sufficiently interested to relate it to others
and seek theirs in return. And yet the egoistic
and limited interest of little children is in this
manner capable of infinite expansion. The lan
guage instinct is the simplest form of the social
expression of the child. Hence it is a great,
perhaps the greatest of all educational resources.

Then there is the instinct of making the
constructive impulse. The child s impulse to
do finds expression first in play, in movement,
gesture, and make-believe, becomes more definite,
and seeks outlet in shaping materials into tangible
forms and permanent embodiment. The child has
not much instinct for abstract inquiry. The
instinct of investigation seems to grow out of the
combination of the constructive impulse with the

60 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

conversational. There is no distinction between
experimental science for little children and the
work done in the carpenter shop. Such work as
they can do in physics or chemistry is not for
the purpose of making technical generalizations
or even arriving at abstract truths. Children
simply like to do things, and watch to see what
will happen. But this can be taken advantage
of, can be directed into ways where it gives
results of value, as well as be allowed to go on
at random.

And so the expressive impulse of the children,
the art instinct, grows also out of the communica
ting and constructive instincts. It is their refine
ment and full manifestation. Make the construc
tion adequate, make it full, free, and flexible, give
it a social motive, something to tell, and you have
a work of art. Take one illustration of this in con
nection with the textile work sewing and weav
ing. The children made a primitive loom in the
shop ; here the constructive instinct was appealed
to. Then they wished to do something with this
loom, to make something. It was the type of
the Indian loom, and they were shown blankets
woven by the Indians. Each child made a
design kindred in idea to those of the Navajo
blankets, and the one which seemed best adapted
to the work in hand was selected. The technical
resources were limited, but the coloring and form

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 61

were worked out by the children. The example
shown was made by the twelve-year-old children.
Examination shows that it took patience, thor
oughness, and perseverance to do the work. It
involved not merely discipline and information of
both a historical sort and the elements of tech
nical design, but also something of the spirit of
art in adequately conveying an idea.

One more instance of the connection of the
art side with the constructive side. The children
had been studying primitive spinning and card
ing, when one of them, twelve years of age, made
a picture of one of the older children spinning.
Here is another piece of work which is not quite
average ; it is better than the average. It is an
illustration of two hands and the drawing out of
the wool to get it ready for spinning. This was
done by a child eleven years of age. But, upon
the whole, with the younger children especially,
the art impulse is connected mainly with the
social instinct the desire to tell, to represent.

Now, keeping in mind these fourfold interests
the interest in conversation or communication ;
in inquiry, or finding out things ; in making
things, or construction ; and in artistic expres
sion we may say they are the natural resources,
the uninvested capital, upon the exercise of which
depends the active growth of the child. I wish
to give one or two illustrations, the first from the

62 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

work of children seven years of age. It illus
trates in a way the dominant desire of the chil
dren to talk, particularly about folks and of things
in relation to folks. If you observe little chil
dren, you will find they are interested in the
world of things mainly in its connection with
people, as a background and medium of human
concerns. Many anthropologists have told us
there are certain identities in the child interests
with those of primitive life. There is a sort or
natural recurrence of the child mind to the
typical activities of primitive peoples ; witness
the hut which the boy likes to build in the
yard, playing hunt, with bows, arrows, spears,
and so on. Again the question comes : What
are we to do with this interest are we to ignore
it, or just excite and draw it out? Or shall we
get hold of it and direct it to something ahead,
something better ? Some of the work that has
been planned for our seven-year-old children has
the latter end in view to utilize this interest
so that it shall become a means of seeing the
progress of the human race. The children begin
by imagining present conditions taken away until
they are in contact with nature at first hand.
That takes them back to a hunting people, to a
people living in caves or trees and getting a pre
carious subsistence by hunting and fishing. They
imagine as far as possible the various natural

CHILD S DRAWING OK A GIRL STINMNC

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 63

physical conditions adapted to that sort of life;
say, a hilly, woody slope, near mountains and
a river where fish would be abundant. Then
they go on in imagination through the hunting to
the semi-agricultural stage, and through the no
madic to the settled agricultural stage. The
point I wish to make is that there is abundant
opportunity thus given for actual study, for in
quiry which results in gaining information. So,
while the instinct primarily appeals to the social
side, the interest of the child in people and their
doings is carried on into the larger world of
reality. For example, the children had some
idea of primitive weapons, of the stone arrow
head, etc. That provided occasion for the testing
of materials as regards their friability, their shape,
texture, etc., resulting in a lesson in mineralogy, as
they examined the different stones to find which
was best suited to the purpose. The discussion
of the iron age supplied a demand for the con
struction of a smelting oven made out of clay,
and of considerable size. As the children did
not get their drafts right at first, the mouth of
the furnace not being in proper relation to the
vent, as to size and position, instruction in the
principles of combustion, the nature of drafts and
of fuel, was required. Yet the instruction was not
given ready-made ; it was first needed, and then
arrived at experimentally. Then the children

64 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

took some material, such as copper, and went
through a series of experiments, fusing it, work
ing it into objects ; and the same experiments
were made with lead and other metals. This work
has been also a continuous course in geography,
since the children have had to imagine and
work out the various physical conditions neces
sary to the different forms of social life implied.
What would be the physical conditions appropri
ate to pastoral life ? to the beginning of agricul
ture ? to fishing ? What would be the natural
method of exchange between these peoples ?
Having worked out such points in conversation,
they have afterward represented them in maps
and sand-molding. Thus they have gained ideas
of the various forms of the configuration of the
earth, and at the same time have seen them
in their relation to human activity, so that they
are not simply external facts, but are fused and
welded with social conceptions regarding the life
and progress of humanity. The result, to my
mind, justifies completely the conviction that
children, in a year of such work (of five hours a
week altogether), get indefinitely more acquaint
ance with facts of science, geography, and
anthropology than they get where information is
the professed end and object, where they are
simply set to learning facts in fixed lessons. As
to discipline, they get more training of attention,

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 65

more power of interpretation, of drawing infer
ences, of acute observation and continuous reflec
tion, than if they were put to working out arbi
trary problems simply for the sake of discipline.
I should like at this point to refer to the reci-
taton. We all know what it has been a placer
where the child shows off to the teacher and the
other children the amount of information he has
succeeded in assimilating from the text-book.
From this other standpoint, the recitation be
comes preeminently a social meeting place; it is
to the school what the spontaneous conversation
is at home, excepting that it is more organized,
following definite lines. The recitation becomes
the social clearing-house, where experiences and
ideas are exchanged and subjected to criticism,
where misconceptions are corrected, and new
lines of thought and inquiry are set up.

This change of the recitation from an examina
tion of knowledge already acquired to the free
play of the children s communicative instinct,
affects and modifies all the language work of the
school. Under the old rtgime it was unques
tionably a most serious problem to give the
children a full and free use of language. The
reason was obvious. The natural motive for
language was seldom offered. In the peda
gogical text-books language is defined as the
medium of expressing thought. It becomes

66 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

that, more or less, to adults with trained minds,
but it hardly needs to be said that language
is primarily a social thing, a means by which
we give our experiences to others and get theirs
again in return. When it is taken from its
natural basis, it is no wonder that it becomes a
complex and difficult problem to teach language.
Think of the absurdity of having to teach lan
guage as a thing by itself. If there is anything the
child will do before he goes to school, it is to
talk of the things that interest him. But when
there are no vital interests appealed to in the
school, when language is used simply for the repe
tition of lessons, it is not surprising that one of the
chief difficulties of school work has come to be
instruction in the mother-tongue. Since the lan
guage taught is unnatural, not growing out of the
real desire to communicate vital impressions and
convictions, the freedom of children in its use
gradually disappears, until finally the high-school
teacher has to invent all kinds of devices to
assist in getting any spontaneous and full use of
speech. Moreover, when the language instinct is
appealed to in a social way, there is a continual
contact with reality. The result is that the child
always has something in his mind to talk about,
he has something to say ; he has a thought to
express, and a thought is not a thought unless
it is one s own. On the traditional method,

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 67

the child must say something that he has merely
learned. There is all the difference in the
world between having something to say and
having to say something. The child who has a
variety of materials and facts wants to talk about
them, and his language becomes more refined
and full, because it is controlled and informed
by realities. Reading and writing, as well as the
oral use of language, maybe taught on this basis.
It can be done in a related way, as the outgrowth
of the child s social desire to recount his experi
ences and get in return the experiences of others,
directed always through contact with the facts
and forces which determine the truth communi
cated.

I shall not have time to speak of the work of
the older children, where the original crude in
stincts of construction and communication have
been developed into something like scientifically
directed inquiry, but I will give an illustration of
the use of language following upon this experi
mental work. The work was on the basis of a
simple experiment of the commonest sort, grad
ually leading the children out into geological and
geographical study. The sentences that I am go
ing to read seem to me poetic as well as "scien
tific." "A long time ago when the earth was new,
when it was lava, there was no water on the earth,
and there was steam all round the earth up in the

68 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

air, as there were many gases in the air. One of
them was carbon dioxide. The steam became
clouds, because the earth began to cool off, and
after a while it began to rain, and the water came
down and dissolved the carbon dioxide from the
air." There is a good deal more science in
that than probably would be apparent at the out
set. It represents some three months of work on
the part of the child. The children kept daily
and weekly records, but this is part of the sum
ming up of the quarter s work. I call this lan
guage poetic, because the child has a clear image
and has a personal feeling for the realities imaged.
I extract sentences from two other records to illus
trate further the vivid use of language when there
is a vivid experience back of it. " When the
earth was cold enough to condense, the water,
with the help of carbon dioxide, pulls the calcium
out of the rocks into a large body of water where
the little animals could get it." The other reads
as follows: "When the earth cooled, calcium
was in the rocks. Then the carbon dioxide and
water united and formed a solution, and, as it ran,
it tore out the calcium and carried it on to the sea,
where there were little animals who took it out of
solution." The use of such words as "pulled " and
"tore" in connection with the process of chem
ical combination evidences a personal realization
which compels its own appropriate expression.

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 69

If I had not taken so much time in my other
illustrations, I should like to show how, beginning
with very simple material things, the children
were led on to larger fields of investigation,
and to the intellectual discipline that is the ac
companiment of such research. I will simply
mention the experiment in which the work
began. It consisted in making precipitated
chalk, used for polishing metals. The children,
with simple apparatus a tumbler, lime water,
and a glass tube precipitated the calcium car
bonate out of the water ; and from this beginning
went on to a study of the processes by which
rocks of various sorts, igneous, sedimentary, etc.,
had been formed on the surface of the earth and
the places they occupy ; then to points in the ge
ography of the United States, Hawaii, and Puerto
Rico ; to the effects of these various bodies of
rock, in their various configurations, upon the
human occupations ; so that this geological record
finally rounded itself out into the life of man at
the present time. The children saw and felt the
connection between these geologic processes tak
ing place ages and ages ago, and the physical
conditions determining the industrial occupations
of today.

Of all the possibilities involved in the subject,
"The School and the Life of the Child," I have
selected but one, because I have found that that

70 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

one gives people more difficulty, is more of a
stumbling-block, than any other. One may be
ready to admit that it would be most desirable
for the school to be a place in which the child
should really live, and get a life-experience in
which he should delight and find meaning for
its own sake. But then we hear this inquiry:
how, upon this basis, shall the child get the
needed information ; how shall he undergo the
required discipline ? Yes, it has come to this,
that with many, if not most, people the normal
processes of life appear to be incompatible with
getting information and discipline. So I have
tried to indicate, in a highly general and inade
quate way (for only the school itself, in its daily
operation, could give a detailed and worthy rep
resentation), how the problem works itself out
how it is possible to lay hold upon the rudimentary
instincts of human nature, and, by supplying a
proper medium, so control their expression as
not only to facilitate and enrich the growth of the
individual child, but also to supply the results,
and far more, of technical information and disci
pline that have been the ideals of education in the
past.

But although I have selected this especial way
of approach (as a concession to the question
almost universally raised), I am not willing to
leave the matter in this mpre or less negative and

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 71

explanatory condition. Life is the great thing
after all ; the life of the child at its time and in
its measure, no less than the life of the adult.
Strange would it be, indeed, if intelligent and
serious attention to what the child now needs and
is capable of in the way of a rich, valuable, and
expanded life should somehow conflict with the
needs and possibilities of later, adult life. " Let
us live with our children," certainly means, first
of all, that our children shall live not that they
shall be hampered and stunted by being forced
into all kinds of conditions, the most remote con
sideration of which is relevancy to the present
life of the child. If we seek the kingdom of
heaven, educationally, all other things shall be
added unto us which, being interpreted, is that
if we identify ourselves with the real instincts ana*" "
needs of childhood, and ask only after its fullest
assertion and growth, the discipline and informa
tion and culture of adult life shall all come in
their due season.

Speaking of culture reminds me that in a way
I have been speaking only of the outside of the
child s activity only of the outward expression
of his impulses toward saying, making, finding
out, and creating. The real child, it hardly need
be said, lives in the world of imaginative values,
and ideas which find only imperfect outward
embodiment. We hear much nowadays about

72 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

the cultivation of the child s "imagination."
Then we undo much of our own talk and work
by a belief that the imagination is some special
part of the child, that finds its satisfaction in some
one particular direction generally speaking, that
of the unreal and make-believe, of the myth
and made-up story. Why are we so hard of
heart and so slow to believe ? The imagination
is the medium in which the child lives. To him
there is everywhere and in everything that occu
pies his mind and activity at all, a surplusage of
value and significance. The question of the rela
tion of the school to the child s life is at bottom
simply this : shall we ignore this native setting
and tendency, dealing not with the living child
at all, but with the dead image we have erected,
or shall we give it play and satisfaction ? If
we once believe in life and in the life of the child,
then will all the occupations and uses spoken of,
then will all history and science, become in
struments of appeal and materials of culture to
his imagination, and through that to the rich
ness and the orderliness of his life. Where we
now see only the outward doing and the outward
product, there, behind all visible results, is the
re-adjustment of mental attitude, the enlarged and
sympathetic vision, the sense of growing power,
and the willing ability to identify both insight
and capacity with the interests of the world and

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 73

man. Unless culture be a superficial polish, a
veneering of mahogany over common wood, it
surely is this the growth of the imagination in
flexibility, in scope, and in sympathy, till the life
which the individual lives is informed with the
life of nature and of society. When nature and
society can live in the schoolroom, when the
forms and tools of learning are subordinated to
the substance of experience, then shall there be
an opportunity for this identification, and culture
shall be the democratic password.

WASTE IN EDUCATION

Ill

WASTE IN EDUCATION

The subject announced for today was "Waste
in Education." I should like first to state briefly
its relation to the two preceding lectures. The
first dealt with the school in its social aspects,
and the necessary re-adjustments that have to be
made to render it effective in present social con
ditions. The second dealt with the school in
relation to the growth of individual children.
Now the third deals with the school as itself an
institution, both in relation to society and to its
own members the children. It deals with the
question of organization, because all waste is the
result of the lack of it, the motive lying behind
organization being promotion of economy and
efficiency. This question is not one of the waste
of money or the waste of things. These matters k
count ; but the primary waste is that of human /I
life, the life of the children while they are at 11
school, and afterward because of inadequate and
perverted preparation.

So, when we speak of organization, we are not

to think simply of the externals ; of that which

goes by the name " school system " the school

board, the superintendent, and the building, the

77

78 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

engaging and promotion of teachers, etc. These
things enter in, but the fundamental organization
is that of the school itself as a community of in
dividuals, in its relations to other forms of social
life. All waste is due to isolation. Organiza
tion is nothing but getting things into connection
with one another, so that they work easily, flexi
bly, and fully. Therefore in speaking of this
question of waste in education, I desire to call
your attention to the isolation of the various
parts of the school system, to the lack of unity
in the aims of education, to the lack of coherence
in its studies and methods.

I have made a chart (I) which, while I speak
of the isolations of the school system itself, may
perhaps appeal to the eye and save a little time
in verbal explanations. A paradoxical friend of
mine says there is nothing so obscure as an illus
tration, and it is quite possible that my attempt
to illustrate my point will simply prove the truth
of his statement.

The blocks represent the various elements in
the school system, and are intended to indicate
roughly the length of time given to each division,
and also the overlapping, both in time and sub
jects studied, of the individual parts of the sys
tem. With each block is given the historical
conditions in which it arose and its ruling
ideal.

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 8 1

The school system, upon the whole, has grown
from the top down. During the middle ages it
was essentially a cluster of professional schools
especially law and theology. Our present uni
versity comes down to us from the middle ages.
I will not say that at present it is a mediaeval
institution, but it had its roots in the middle ages,
and it has not outlived all mediaeval traditions
regarding learning.

The kindergarten, rising with the present cen
tury, was a union of the nursery and of the phi
losophy of Schelling ; a wedding of the plays
and games which the mother carried on with her
children, to Schilling s highly romantic and sym
bolic philosophy. The elements that came from
the actual study of child life the continuation
of the nursery have remained a life-bringing
force in all education ; the Schellingesque factors
made an obstruction between it and the rest of
the school system, brought about isolations.

The line drawn over the top indicates that
there is a certain interaction between the kinder
garten and the primary school ; for, so far as the
primary school remained in spirit foreign to the
natural interests of child life, it was isolated from
the kindergarten, so that it is a problem, at pres
ent, to introduce kindergarten methods into the
primary school ; the problem of the so-called
connecting class. The difficulty is that the two

82 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

are not one from the start. To get a connection
the teacher has had to climb over the wall instead
of entering in at the gate.

On the side of aims, the ideal of the kinder
garten was the moral development of the children,
rather than instruction or discipline ; an ideal
sometimes emphasized to the point of sentimen
tality. The primary school grew practically out
of the popular-movement of the sixteenth century,
when along with the invention of printing and
the growth of commerce, it became a business
necessity to know how to read, write, and figure.
The aim was distinctly a practical one ; it was
utility ; getting command of these tools, the sym
bols of learning, not for the sake of learning, but
because they gave access to careers in life other
wise closed.

The division next to the primary school is the
grammar school. The term is not much used in
the West, but is common in the eastern states.
It goes back to the time of the revival of learn
ing a little earlier perhaps than the conditions
out of which the primary school originated, and,
even when contemporaneous, having a different
ideal. It had to do with the study of language
in the higher sense ; because, at the time of the
Renaissance, Latin and Greek connected people
with the culture of the past, with the Roman and
Greek world. The classic languages were the

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 83

only means of escape from the limitations of the
middle ages. Thus there sprang up the proto
type of the grammar school, more liberal than
the university (so largely professional in charac
ter), for the purpose of putting into the hands of
the people the key to the old learning, that
men might see a world with a larger horizon.
The object was primarily culture, secondarily dis
cipline. It represented much more than the
present grammar school. It was the liberal ele
ment in the college, which, extending downward,
grew into the academy and the high school.
Thus the secondary school is still in part just a
lower college (having an even higher curriculum
than the college of a few centuries ago) or a pre
paratory department to a college, and in part a
rounding up of the utilities of the elementary
school.

There appear then two products of the nine
teenth century, the technical and normal schools.
The schools of technology, engineering, etc., are,
of course, mainly the development of nineteenth-
century business conditions, as the primary school
was the development of business conditions of
the sixteenth century. The normal school arose
because of the necessity for training teachers,
with the idea partly of professional drill, and
partly that of culture.

Without going into more detail, we have

84 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

some eight different parts of the school system
as represented on the chart, all of which arose
historically at different times, having different
ideals in view, and consequently different meth
ods. I do not wish to suggest that all of the
isolation, all of the separation, that has existed
in the past between the different parts of the
school system still persists. One must, however,
recognize that they have never yet been welded
into one complete whole. The great problem in
education on the administrative side is how to
unite these different parts.

Consider the training schools for teachers
the normal schools. These occupy at present a
somewhat anomalous position, intermediate be
tween the high school and the college, requiring
the high-school preparation, and covering a cer
tain amount of college work. They are isolated
from the higher subject-matter of scholarship,
since, upon the whole, their object has been
to train persons how to teach, rather than what
to teach ; while, if we go to the college, we find
the other half of this isolation learning what to
teach, with almost a contempt for methods of
teaching. The college is shut off from contact
with children and youth. Its members, to a great
extent, away from home and forgetting their own
childhood, become eventually teachers with a
large amount of subject-matter at command, and

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 85

little knowledge of how this is related to the
minds of those to whom it is to be taught. In
this division between what to teach and how to
teach, each side suffers from the separation.

It is interesting to follow out the inter-relation
between primary, grammar, and high schools.
The elementary school has crowded up and
taken many subjects previously studied in the
old New England grammar school. The high
school has pushed its subjects down. Latin and
algebra have been put in the upper grades, so
that the seventh and eighth grades are, after all,
about all that is left of the old grammar school.
They are a sort of amorphous composite, being
partly a place where children go on learning
what they already have learned (to read, write,
and figure) , and partly a place of preparation for
the high school. The name in some parts of
New England for these upper grades was "Inter
mediate School." The term was a happy one ;
the work was simply intermediate between some
thing that had been and something that was
going to be, having no special meaning on its
own account.

Just as the parts are separated, so do the ideals
differ moral development, practical utility,
general culture, discipline, and professional train
ing. These aims are each especially represented
in some distinct part of the system of education ;

86 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

and with the growing interaction of the parts,
each is supposed to afford a certain amount of
culture, discipline, and utility. But the lack of
fundamental unity is witnessed in the fact that
one study is still considered good for discipline,
and another for culture ; some parts of arithmetic,
for example, for discipline and others for use,
literature for culture, grammar for discipline,
geography partly for utility, partly for culture;
and so on. The unity of education is dissipated,
and the studies become centrifugal ; so much of
this study to secure this end, so much of that to
secure another, until the whole becomes a sheer
compromise and patchwork between contending
aims and disparate studies. The great problem
in education on the administrative side is to
secure the unity of the whole, in the place of a
sequence of more or less unrelated and overlap
ping parts and thus to reduce the waste arising
from friction, reduplication and transitions that
are not properly bridged.

In this second symbolic diagram (II) I wish to
suggest that really the only way to unite the parts
of the system is to unite each to life. We can get
only an artificial unity so long as we confine our
gaze to the school system itself. We must look
at it as part of the larger whole of social life. This
block (A) in the center represents the school
system as a whole. ( I ) At one side we have the

n

Schoo
A

B

H
t

(0

g <u

S8

ft (0

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 89

home, and the two arrows represent the free
interplay of influences, materials, and ideas be
tween the home life and that of the school. (2)
Below we have the relation to the natural envi
ronment, the great field of geography in the widest
sense. The school building has about it a natural
environment. It ought to be in a garden, and
the children from the garden would be led on to
surrounding fields, and then into the wider coun
try, with all its facts and forces. (3) Above is
represented business life, and the necessity for
free play between the school and the needs
and forces of industry. (4) On the other side
is the university proper, with its various phases,
its laboratories, its resources in the way of
libraries, museums, and professional schools.

From the standpoint of the child, the great
waste in the school comes from his inability to
utilize the experiences he gets outside the school
in any complete and free way within the school
itself ; while, on the other hand, he is unable to
apply in daily life what he is learning at school.
That is the isolation of the school its isolation
from life. When the child gets into the school
room he has to put out of his mind a large part of
the ideas, interests, and activities that predomi
nate in his home and neighborhood. So the school,
being unable to utilize this everyday experience,
sets painfully to work, on another tack and by a

90 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

variety of means, to arouse in the child an interest
in school studies. While I was visiting in the city
of Moline a few years ago, the superintendent told
me that they found many children every year,
who were surprised to learn that the Mississippi
river in the text-book had anything to do with
the stream of water flowing past their homes.
The geography being simply a matter of the
schoolroom, it is more or less of an awakening to
many children to find that the whole thing is
nothing but a more formal and definite statement
of the facts which they see, feel, and touch every
day. When we think that we all live on the
earth, that we live in an atmosphere, that our lives
are touched at every point by the influences of
the soil, flora, and fauna, by considerations of
light and heat, and then think of what the school
study of geography has been, we have a typical
idea of the gap existing between the everyday
experiences of the child, and the isolated mate
rial supplied in such large measure in the school.
This is but an instance, and one upon which most
of us may reflect long before we take the pres
ent artificiality of the school as other than a mat
ter of course or necessity.

Though there should be organic connection
between the school and business life, it is not
meant that the school is to prepare the child for
any particular business, but that there should be

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 91

a natural connection of the everyday life of the
child with the business environment about him,
and that it is the affair of the school to clarify
and liberalize this connection, to bring it to con
sciousness, not by introducing special studies,
like commercial geography and arithmetic, but
by keeping alive the ordinary bonds of relation.
The subject of compound-business-partnership is
probably not in many of the arithmetics nowa
days, though it was there not a generation ago,
for the makers of text-books said that if they
left out anything they could not sell their books.
This compound-business-partnership originated
as far back as the sixteenth century. The joint-
stock company had not been invented, and as
large commerce with the Indies and Americas
grew up, it was necessary to have an accumula
tion of capital with which to handle it. One man
said, "I will put in this amount of money for six
months," and another, "So much for two years,"
and so on. Thus by joining together they got
money enough to float their commercial enter
prises. Naturally, then, " compound partnership "
was taught in the schools. The joint-stock com
pany was invented ; compound partnership dis
appeared, but the problems relating to it stayed
in the arithmetics for two hundred years. They
were kept after they had ceased to have practi
cal utility, for the sake of mental discipline

92 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

they were "such hard problems, you know." A
great deal of what is now in the arithmetics
under the head of percentage is of the same
nature. Children of twelve and thirteen years of
age go through gain and loss calculations, and
various forms of bank discount so complicated
that the bankers long ago dispensed with them.
And when it is pointed out that business is not
done this way, we hear again of " mental disci-
pline." And yet there are plenty of real con
nections between the experience of children and
business conditions which need to be utilized and
illuminated. The child should study his com
mercial arithmetic and geography, not as isolated
things by themselves, but in their reference to
his social environment. The youth needs to
become acquainted with the bank as a factor in
modern life, with what it does, and how it does
it ; and then relevant arithmetical processes
would have some meaning quite in contradis
tinction to the time-absorbing and mind-killing
examples in percentage, partial payments, etc.,
found in all our arithmetics.

The connection with the university, as indi
cated in this chart, I need not dwell upon. I
simply wish to indicate that there ought to be
a free interaction between all the parts of the
school system. There is much of utter triviality
of subject-matter in elementary and secondary

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 93

education. When we investigate it, we find that
it is full of facts taught that are not facts, which
have to be unlearned later on. Now, this hap
pens because the "lower" parts of our system
are not in vital connection with the "higher."
The university or college, in its idea, is a place of
research, where investigation is going on, a place
of libraries and museums, where the best resources
of the past are gathered, maintained and organ
ized. It is, however, as true in the school as in
the university that the spirit of inquiry can be
got only through and with the attitude of inquiry.
The pupil must learn what has meaning, what
enlarges his horizon, instead of mere trivialities.
He must become acquainted with truths, instead
of things that were regarded as such fifty years
ago, or that are taken as interesting by the mis
understanding of a partially educated teacher.
It is difficult to see how these ends can be
reached except as the most advanced part of the
educational system is in complete interaction
with the most rudimentary.

The next chart (III) is an enlargement of the
second. The school building has swelled out, so
to speak, the surrounding environment remaining
the same, the home, the garden and country, the
relation to business life and the university. The
object is to show what the school must become
to get out of its isolation and secure the organic

94 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

connection with social life of which we have been
speaking. It is not our architect s plan for the
school building that we hope to have ; but it is a
diagrammatic representation of the idea which
we want embodied in the school building. On
the lower side you see the dining-room and the
kitchen, at the top the wood and metal shops, and
the textile room for sewing and weaving. The
center represents the manner in which all come
together in the library; that is to say, in a collec
tion of the intellectual resources of all kinds that
throw light upon the practical work, that give it
meaning and liberal value. If the four corners
represent practice, the interior represents the the
ory of the practical activities. In other words,
the object of these forms of practice in the school
is not found chiefly in themselves, or in the tech
nical skill of cooks, seamstresses, carpenters and
masons, but in their connection, on the social
side, with the life without ; while on the individ
ual side they respond to the child s need of action,
of expression, of desire to do something, to be
constructive and creative, instead of simply pas
sive and conforming. Their great significance is
that they keep the balance between the social
and individual sides the chart symbolizing par
ticularly the connection with the social. Here on
one side is the home. How naturally the lines of
connection play back and forth between the home

2-23

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 97

and the kitchen and the textile room of the school!
The child can carry over what he learns in the
home and utilize it in the school; and the things
learned in the school he applies at home. These
are the two great things in breaking down isola
tion, in getting connection to have the child
come to school with all the experience he has
got outside the school, and to leave it with some
thing to be immediately used in his everyday life.
The child comes to the traditional school with a
healthy body and a more or less unwilling mind,
though, in fact, he does not bring both his body
and mind with him ; he has to leave his mind
behind, because there is no way to use it in the
school. If he had a purely abstract mind, he
could bring it to school with him, but his is a
concrete one, interested in concrete things, and
unless these things get over into school life, he
cannot take his mind with him. What we want
is to have the child come to school with a whole
mind and a whole body, and leave school with a
fuller mind and an even healthier body. And
speaking of the body suggests that, while there
is no gymnasium in these diagrams, the active
life carried on in its four corners brings with it
constant physical exercise, while our gymna
sium proper will deal with the particular weak
nesses of children and their correction, and
will attempt more consciously to build up the

98 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

thoroughly sound body as the abode of the sound
mind.

That the dining-room and kitchen connect with
the country and its processes and products it is
hardly necessary to say. Cooking may be so
taught that it has no connection with country life,
and with the sciences that find their unity in geog
raphy. Perhaps it generally has been taught with
out these connections being really made. But
all the materials that come into the kitchen have
their origin in the country ; they come from the
soil, are nurtured through the influences of light
and water, and represent a great variety of
local environments. Through this connection,
extending from the garden into the larger world,
the child has his most natural introduction to the
study of the sciences. Where did these things
grow ? What was necessary to their growth ?
What their relation to the soil ? What the effect
of different climatic conditions? and so on. We
all know what the old-fashioned botany was :
partly collecting flowers that were pretty, press
ing and mounting them ; partly pulling these
flowers to pieces and giving technical names to
the different parts, finding all the different leaves,
naming all their different shapes and forms. It
was a study of plants without any reference to
the soil, to the country, or to growth. In contrast,
a real study of plants takes them in their natural

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 99

environment and in their uses as well, not simply
as food, but in all their adaptations to the social
life of man. Cooking becomes as well a most
natural introduction to the study of chemistry, giv
ing the child here also something which he can at
once bring to bear upon his daily experience. I
once heard a very intelligent woman say that she
could not understand how science could be
taught to little children, because she did not see
how they could understand atoms and molecules.
In other words, since she did not see how highly
abstract facts could be presented to the child
independently of daily experience, she could not
understand how science could be taught at all.
Before we smile at this remark, we need to ask
ourselves if she is alone in her assumption, or
whether it simply formulates almost all of our
school practice.

The same relations with the outside world are
found in the carpentry and the textile shops.
They connect with the country, as the source of
their materials, with physics, as the science of
applying energy, with commerce and distribution,
with art in the development of .architecture and
decoration. They have also an intimate connec
tion with the university on the side of its tech
nological and engineering schools ; with the lab
oratory, and its scientific methods and results.

To go back to the square which is marked the

ioo THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

library (Chart III, A) : if you imagine rooms half
in the four corners and half in the library, you will
get the idea of the recitation room. That is the
place where the children bring the experiences, the
problems, the questions, the particular facts which
they have found, and discuss them so that new
light may be thrown upon them, particularly new
light from the experience of others, the accumu
lated wisdom of the world symbolized in the
library. Here is the organic relation of theory and
practice; the child not simply doing things, but
getting also the idea of what he does ; getting
from the start some intellectual conception that
enters into his practice and enriches it ; while
every idea finds, directly or indirectly, some appli
cation in experience, and has some effect upon
life. This, I need hardly say, fixes the position
of the "book" or reading in education. Harm
ful as a substitute for experience, it is all-impor
tant in interpreting and expanding experience.

The other chart (IV) illustrates precisely the
same idea. It gives the symbolic upper story of
this ideal school. In the upper corners are the
laboratories ; in the lower corners are the studios
for art work, both the graphic and auditory
arts. The questions, the chemical and physical
problems, arising in the kitchen and shop, are
taken to the laboratories to be worked out. For
instance, this past week one of the older groups

all

16

fi 13

I

u

28

O 0)

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 103

of children doing practical work in weaving
which involved the use of the spinning wheel,
worked out the diagrams of the direction of
forces concerned in treadle and wheel, and the
ratio of velocities between wheel and spindle.
In the same manner, the plants with which the
child has to do in cooking, afford the basis for a
concrete interest in botany, and may be taken and
studied by themselves. In a certain school in
Boston science work for months was centered in
the growth of the cotton plant, and yet some
thing new was brought in every day. We hope
to do similar work with all the types of plants
that furnish materials for sewing and weaving.
These examples will suggest, I hope, the relation
which the laboratories bear to the rest of the
school.

The drawing and music, or the graphic and
auditory arts, represent the culmination, the
idealization, the highest point of refinement of
all the work carried on. I think everybody who
has not a purely literary view of the subject recog
nizes that genuine art grows out of the work of
the artisan. The art of the Renaissance was great,
because it grew out of the manual arts of life. It
did not spring up in a separate atmosphere, how
ever ideal, but carried on to their spiritual mean
ing processes found in homely and everyday
forms of life. The school should observe this

104 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

relationship. The merely artisan side is narrow,
but the mere art, taken by itself, and grafted on
from without, tends to become forced, empty,
sentimental. I do not mean, of course, that all
art work must be correlated in detail to the
other work of the school, but simply that a
spirit of union gives vitality to the art, and depth
and richness to the other work. All art involves
physical organs, the eye and hand, the ear and
voice; and yet it is something more than the
mere technical skill required by the organs of
expression. It involves an idea, a thought, a
spiritual rendering of things ; and yet it is other
than any number of ideas by themselves. It is a
living union of thought and the instrument of
expression. This union is symbolized by saying
that in the ideal school the art work might be
considered to be that of the shops, passed through
the alembic of library and museum into action
again.

Take the textile room as an illustration of such
a synthesis. I am talking about a future school,
the one we hope, some time, to have. The basal
fact in that room is that it is a workshop, doing
actual things in sewing, spinning, and weaving.
The children come into immediate connection
with the materials, with various fabrics of silk, cot
ton, linen and wool. Information at once appears
in connection with these materials ; their origin,

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 105

history, their adaptation to particular uses, and
.the machines of various kinds by which the raw
materials are utilized. Discipline arises in dealing
with the problems involved, both theoretical and
practical. Whence does the culture arise ? Partly
from seeing all these things reflected through
the medium of their scientific and historic con
ditions and associations, whereby the child learns
to appreciate them as technical achievements,
as thoughts precipitated in action ; and partly
because of the introduction of the art idea into
the room itself. In the ideal school there would
be something of this sort : first, a complete indus
trial museum, giving samples of materials in vari
ous stages of manufacture, and the implements,
from the simplest to the most complex, used in
dealing with them ; then a collection of photo
graphs and pictures illustrating the landscapes
and the scenes from which the materials come,
their native homes, and their places of manufac
ture. Such a collection would be a vivid and
continual lesson in the synthesis of art, science,
and industry. There would be, also, samples of
the more perfect forms of textile work, as Italian,
French, Japanese, and Oriental. There would
be objects illustrating motives of design and
decoration which have entered into production.
Literature would contribute its part in its ideal
ized representation of the world-industries, as

io6 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

the Penelope in the Odyssey a classic in lit
erature only because the character is an adequate
embodiment of a certain industrial phase of social
life. So, from Homer down to the present time,
there is a continuous procession of related facts
which have been translated into terms of art.
Music lends its share, from the Scotch song at
the wheel to the spinning song of Marguerite, or
of Wagner s Senta. The shop becomes a pictured
museum, appealing to the eye. It would have
not only materials, beautiful woods and designs,
but would give a synopsis of the historical evolu
tion of architecture in its drawings and pictures.
Thus I have attempted to indicate how the
school may be connected with life so that the
experience gained by the child in a familiar,
commonplace way is carried over and made
use of there, and what the child learns in the
school is carried back and applied in everyday
life, making the school an organic whole, instead
of a composite of isolated parts. The isolation
of studies as well as of parts of the school sys
tem disappears. Experience has its geographical
aspect, its artistic and its literary, its scientific
and its historical sides. All studies arise from
aspects of the one earth and the one life lived
upon it. We do not have a series of stratified
earths, one of which is mathematical, another
physical, another historical, and so on. We

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 107

should not live very long in any one taken by
itself. We live in a world where all sides are
bound together. All studies grow out of relations
in the one great comthon world. When the child
lives in varied but doncrete and active relation
ship to this common world, his studies are natu
rally unified. It will no longer be a problem to
correlate studies. The teacher will not have to
resort to all sorts of devices to weave a little
arithmetic into the history lesson, and the like.
Relate the school to life, and all studies are of
necessity correlated.

Moreover, if the school is related as a whole to
life as a whole, its various aims and ideals cul
ture, discipline, information, utility cease to be
variants, for one of which we must select one
study and for another another. The growth of
the child in the direction of social capacity and
service, his larger and more vital union with life,
becomes the unifying aim ; and discipline, culture
and information fall into place as phases of this
growth.

I wish to say one word more about the rela
tionship of our particular school to the Univer
sity. The problem is to unify, to organize edu
cation, to bring all its various factors together,
through putting it as a whole into organic union
with everyday life. That which lies back of
the pedagogical school of the University is the

io8 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

necessity of working out something to serve as a
model for such unification, extending from work
beginning with the four-year-old child up through
the graduate work of the University. Already
we have much help from the University in scientific
work planned, sometimes even in detail, by heads
of the departments. The graduate student comes
to us with his researches and methods, suggesting
ideas and problems. The library and museum
are at hand. We want to bring all things edu
cational together; to break down the barriers
that divide the education of the little child from
the instruction of the maturing youth ; to identify
the lower and the higher education, so that it
shall be demonstrated to the eye that there is no
lower and higher, but simply education.

Speaking more especially with reference to
the pedagogical side of the work : I suppose
the oldest university chair of pedagogy in our
country is about twenty years old that of the
University of Michigan, founded in the latter
seventies. But there are only one or two that
have tried to make a connection between theory
and practice. They teach for the most part by
theory, by lectures, by reference to books, rather
than through the actual work of teaching itself.
At Columbia, through the Teachers College,
there is an extensive and close connection between
the University and the training of teachers.

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 109

Something has been done in one or two other
places along the same line. We want an even
more intimate union here, so that the University
shall put all its resources at the disposition of the
elementary school, contributing to the evolution
of valuable subject-matter and right method,
while the school in turn will be a laboratory in
which the student of education sees theories and
ideas demonstrated, tested, criticised, enforced,
and the evolution of new truths. We want the
school in its relation to the University to be a
working model of a unified education.

A word as to the relation of the school to
educational interests generally. I heard once
that the adoption of a certain method in use in
our school was objected to by a teacher on this
ground : "You know that it is an experimental
school. They do not work under the same
conditions that we are subject to." Now, the
purpose of performing an experiment is that
other people need not experiment ; at least need
not experiment so much, may have something
definite and positive to go by. An experiment
demands particularly favorable conditions in
order that results may be reached both freely
and securely. It has to work unhampered, with
all the needed resources at command. Labor
atories lie back of all the great business enter"
prises of today, back of every great factory,

no THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

every railway and steamship system. Yet the
laboratory is not a business enterprise ; it does
not aim to secure for itself the conditions of
business life, nor does the commercial undertak
ing repeat the laboratory. There is a difference
between working out and testing a new truth, or
a new method, and applying it on a wide scale,
making it available for the mass of men, making
it commercial. But the first thing is to discover
the truth, to afford all necessary facilities, for
this is the most practical thing in the world in
the long run. We do not expect to have other
schools literally imitate what we do. A working
model is not something to be copied ; it is to
afford a demonstration of the feasibility of the
principle, and of the methods which make it
feasible. So (to come back to our own point)
we want here to work out the problem of the
unity, the organization of the school system in
itself, and to do this by relating it so intimately
to life as to demonstrate the possibility and
necessity of such organization for all education.

THREE YEARS OF THE UNI
VERSITY ELEMENTARY
SCHOOL

IV

THREE YEARS OF THE UNIVERSITY
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 1

The school was started the first week in Janu
ary, three years ago. I shall try this afternoon to
give a brief statement of the ideas and problems
that were in mind when the experiment was
started, and a sketch of the development of the
work since that time. We began in a small house
in Fifty-seventh street, with fifteen children. We
found ourselves the next year with twenty-five
children in Kimbark avenue, and then moved in
January to Rosalie court, the larger quarters
enabling us to take forty children. The next
year the numbers increased to sixty, the school
remaining at Rosalie court. This year we have
had ninety-five on the roll at one time, and are
located at 5412 Ellis avenue, where we hope to
stay till we have a building and grounds of our
own.

The children during the first year of the school
were between the ages of six and nine. Now

* Stenographic report of a talk by John Dewey at a meeting
of the Parents Association of the University Elementary School,
February, 1899; somewhat revised.
"3

1 14 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

their ages range between four and thirteen the
members of the oldest group being in their thir
teenth year. This is the first year that we have
children under six, and this has been made possi
ble through the liberality of friends in Honolulu,
H. I., who are building up there a -memorial kin
dergarten along the same lines.

The expenses of the school during the first
year, of two terms only, were between $1,300 and
$1,400. The expenses this year will be about
$12,000. Of this amount $5,500 will come from
tuitions; $5,000 has been given by friends inter
ested in the school, and there remains about
$1,500 yet to be raised for the conduct of the
school. This is an indication of the increase of
expenses. The average expense per pupil is
about the same since the start, i, e., $120 per
child per school year. Relatively speaking, this
year the expenses of the school took something
of a jump, through the expense of moving to a
new building, and the repairs and changes there
necessary. An increase in the staff of teachers
has also enlarged the work as well as the debits
of the school. Next year (1899-1900) we hope
to have about 120 children, and apparently the
expenses will be about $2,500 more than this. Of
this amount $2,000 will be met by the increase in
tuition from the pupils. The cost of a child to
the school, $120 a year, is precisely the tuition

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 1 1 5

charged by the University for students and is
double the average tuition charged by the school.
But it is not expected that the University tuition
will come anywhere near meeting the expense
involved there. One reason for not increasing
the tuition here, even if it were advisable for other
reasons, is that it is well to emphasize, from an
educational point of view, that elementary as
well as advanced education requires endowment.
There is every reason why money should be
spent freely for the organization and mainte
nance of foundation work in education as well
as for the later stages.

The elementary school has had from the out
set two sides : one, the obvious one of instruc
tion of the children who have been intrusted to
it ; the other, relationship to the University,
since the school is under the charge, and forms a
part of the pedagogical work of the University.

When the school was started, there were cer
tain ideas in mind perhaps it would be better
to say questions and problems ; certain points
which it seemed worth while to test. If you will
permit one personal word, I should like to say
that it is sometimes thought that the school
started out with a number of ready-made princi
ples and ideas which were to be put into practice
at once. It has been popularly assumed that I
am the author of these ready-made ideas and

1 1 6 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

principles which were to go into execution. I
take this opportunity to say that the educational
conduct of the school, as well as its administra
tion, the selection of subject-matter, and the
working out of the course of study, as well as
actual instruction of children, have been almost
entirely in the hands of the teachers of the
school ; and that there has been a gradual devel
opment of the educational principles and meth
ods involved, not a fixed equipment. The teach
ers started with question marks, rather than with
fixed rules, and if any answers have been reached,
it is the teachers in the school who have supplied
them. We started upon the whole with four such
questions, or problems :

i. What can be done, and how can it be
done, to bring the school into closer relation
with the home and neighborhood life instead of
having the school a place where the child comes
solely to learn certain lessons ? What can be
done to break down the barriers which have unfor
tunately come to separate the school life from the
rest of the everyday life of the child ? This does
not mean, as it is sometimes, perhaps, interpreted
to mean, that the child should simply take up in
the school things already experienced at home
and study them, but that, so far as possible, the
child shall have the same attitude and point of
view in the school as in the home ; that he shall

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 1 1 7

find the same interest in going to school, and in
there doing things worth doing for their own sake,
that he finds in the plays and occupations which
busy him in his home and neighborhood life. It
means, again, that the motives which keep the
child at work and growing at home shall be used
in the school, so that he shall not have to acquire
another set of principles of actions belonging
only to the school separate from those of the
home. It is a question of the unity of the child s
experience, of its actuating motives and aims,
not of amusing or even interesting the child.

2. What can be done in the way of introdu
cing subject-matter in history and science and art,
that shall have a positive value and real signifi
cance in the child s own life ; that shall represent,
even to the youngest children, something worthy
of attainment in skill or knowledge ; as much so
to the little pupil as are the studies of the high-
school or college student to him ? You know
what the traditional curriculum of the first few
years is, even though many modifications have
been made. Some statistics have been collected
showing that 75 or 80 per cent, of the first three
years of a child in school are spent "upon the
form not the substance of learning, the
mastering of the symbols of reading, writing,
and arithmetic. There is not much positive nu
triment in this. Its purpose is important is

n8 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

necessary but it does not represent the same kind
of increase in a child s intellectual and moral ex
perience that is represented by positive truth of
history and nature, or by added insight into reality
and beauty. One thing, then, we wanted to find
out is how much can be given a child that is
really worth his while to get, in knowledge of the
world about him, of the forces in the world, of
historical and social growth, and in capacity to
express himself in a variety of artistic forms.
From the strictly educational side this has been
the chief problem of the school. It is along this
line that we hope to make our chief contribution
to education in general ; we hope, that is, to work
out and publish a positive body of subject-matter
which may be generally available.

3. How can instruction in these formal, sym
bolic branches the mastering of the ability to
read, write, and use figures intelligently be
carried on with everyday experience and occu
pation as their background and in definite rela
tions to other studies of more inherent content,
and be carried on in such a way that the child
shall feel their necessity through their connection
with subjects which appeal to him on their own
account? If this can be accomplished, he will
have a vital motive for getting the technical
capacity. It is not meant, as has been sometimes
jocosely stated, that the child learn to bake and

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 119

sew at school, and to read, write, and figure at
home. It is intended that these formal subjects
shall not be presented in such large doses at first
as to be the exclusive objects of attention, and
that the child shall be led by that which he is
doing to feel the need for acquiring skill in the
use of symbols and the immediate power they
give. In any school, if the child realizes the mo
tive for the use and application of number and
language he has taken the longest step toward
securing the power ; and he can realize the mo
tive only as he has some particular not some
general and remote use for the symbols.

4. Individual attention. This is secured by
small groupings eight or ten in a class and
a large number of teachers supervising systemati
cally the intellectual needs and attainments and
physical well-being and growth of the child. To
secure this we have now 135 hours of instruct
ors time per week, that is, the time of nine
teachers for three hours per day, or one teacher
per group. It requires but a few words to make
this statement about attention to individual pow
ers and needs, and yet the whole of the school s
aims and methods, moral, physical, intellectual,
are bound up in it.

I think these four points present a fair state
ment of what we have set out to discover. The
school is often called an experimental school, and

120 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

in one sense that is the proper name. I do not
like to use it too much, for fear parents will
think we are experimenting upon the children,
and that they naturally object to. But it is an
experimental school at least I hope so with
reference to education and educational problems.
We have attempted to find out by trying, by do
ing not alone by discussion and theorizing
whether these problems may be worked out, and
how they may be worked out.

Next a few words about the means that have
been used in the school in order to test these
four questions, and to supply their answers,
and first as to the place given to hand-work of
different kinds in the school. There are three
main lines regularly pursued : (#) the shop-work
with wood and tools, () cooking work, and (c)
work with textiles sewing and weaving. Of
course, there is other hand-work in connection
with science, as science is largely of an experi
mental nature. It is a fact that may not have
come to your attention that a large part of the
best and most advanced scientific work involves
a great deal of manual skill, the training of the
hand and eye. It is impossible for one to be a
first-class worker in science without this train
ing in manipulation, and in handling apparatus
and materials. In connection with the his
tory work, especially with the younger children,

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 121

hand-work is brought in in the way of making
implements, weapons, tools, etc. Of course, the
art work is another side drawing, painting, and
modeling. Logically, perhaps, the gymnasium
work does not come in here, but as a means
of developing moral and intellectual control
through the medium of the body it certainly
does. The children have one-half hour per
day of this form of physical exercise. Along
this line we have found that hand-work, in large
variety and amount, is the most easy and natural
method of keeping up the same attitude of the
child in and out of the school. The child gets the
largest part of his acquisitions through his bodily
activities, until he learns to work systematically
with the intellect. That is the purpose of this
work in the school, to direct these activities, to
systematize and organize them, so that they shall
not be as haphazard and as wandering as they are
outside of school. The problem of making these
forms of practical activity work continuously and
definitely together, leading from one factor of skill
to another, from one intellectual difficulty to
another, has been one of the most difficult, and
at the same time one in which we have been
most successful. The various kinds of work,
carpentry, cooking, sewing, and weaving, are
selected as involving different kinds of skill, and
demanding different types of intellectual attitude

122 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

on the part of the child, and because they repre
sent some of the most important activities of the
everyday outside world : the question of living
under shelter, of daily food and clothing, of the
home, of personal movement and exchange of
goods. He gets also the training of sense organs,
of touch, of sight, and the ability to coordinate
eye and hand. He gets healthy exercise ; for the
child demands a much larger amount of physical
activity than the formal program of the ordi
nary school permits. There is also a continual
appeal to memory, to judgment, in adapting
ends to means, a training in habits of order,
industry, and neatness in the care of the tools
and utensils, and in doing things in a systematic,
instead of a haphazard, way. Then, again,
these practical occupations make a background,
especially in the earlier groups, for the later
studies. The children get a good deal of
chemistry in connection with cooking, of number
work and geometrical principles in carpentry, and
a good deal of geography in connection with
their theoretical work in weaving and sewing.
History also comes in with the origin and growth
of various inventions, and their effects upon
social life and political organization.

Perhaps more attention, upon the whole, has
been given to our second point, that of positive
subject-matter, than to any one other thing. On

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 123

the history side the curriculum is now fairly well
worked out. The younger children begin with the
home and occupations of the home. In the sixth
year the intention is that the children should
study occupations outside the home, the larger
social industries farming, mining, lumber, etc.
that they may see the complex and various social
industries on which life depends, while inciden
tally they investigate the use of the various mate
rials woods, metals, and the processes applied
thus getting a beginning of scientific study. The
next year is given to the historical development
of industry and invention starting with man as
a savage and carrying him through the typical
phases of his progress upward, until the iron age
is reached and man begins to enter upon a
civilized career. The object of the study of
primitive life is not to keep the child inter
ested in lower and relatively savage stages,
but to show him the steps of progress and
development, especially along the line of in
vention, by which man was led into civiliza
tion. There is a certain nearness, after all, in
the child to primitive forms of life. They are
much more simple than existing institutions.
By throwing the emphasis upon the progress
of man, and upon the way advance has been
made, we hope to avoid the objections that
hold against paying too much attention to

124 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

the crudities and distracting excitements of sav
age life.

The next two or three years, i. e., the fourth
and fifth grades, and perhaps the sixth, will be
devoted to American history. It is then that
history, properly speaking, begins, as the study
of primitive life can hardly be so called.

Then comes Greek history and Roman, in
the regular chronological order, each year having
its own work planned with reference to what has
come before and after.

The science work was more difficult to arrange
and systematize, because there was so little to
follow so little that has been already done in
an organized way. We are now at work upon a
program, 1 and I shall not speak in detail about it.
The first two or three years cultivate the chil
dren s powers of observation, lead them to sym
pathetic interest in the habits of plants and
animals, and to look at things with reference to
their uses. Then the center of the work becomes
geographical the study of the earth, as the most
central thing. From this almost all the work
grows out, and to it the work goes back. Another
standpoint in the science work is that of the
application of natural forces to the service of man
through machines. Last year a good deal of work

This year s program is published in the Elementary School
Record. Address The University of Chicago Press for particulars.

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 125

was done in electricity (and will be repeated this
year), based on the telegraph and telephone
taking up the things that can easily be grasped.

In mechanics they have studied locks and clocks
with reference to the adaptation of the various
parts of the machinery. All this work makes
a most excellent basis for more formal physics
later on. Cooking gives opportunity for get
ting a great many ideas of heat and water, and
of their effects. The scientific work taken up
in the school differs mainly from that of other
schools in having the experimental part phys
ics and chemistry emphasized, and is not con
fined simply to nature study the study of
plants and animals. Not that the latter is less
valuable, but that we find it possible to introduce
the physical aspects from the first.

If I do not spend a large amount of time in
speaking of the music and art work, it is not
because they are not considered valuable and
important certainly as much so as any other
work done in the school, not only in the
development of the child s moral and aes
thetic nature, but also from a strictly intel
lectual point of view. I know of no work in
the school that better develops the power of
attention, the habit of observation and of con-
secutiveness, of seeing parts in relation to a
whole.

126 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

I shall now say a few words about the admin
istrative side of the school. At the outset we
mixed up the children of different ages and attain
ments as much as possible, believing there were
mental advantages in the give-and-take thus
secured, as well as the moral advantages in hav
ing the older assume certain responsibilities in
the care of the younger. As the school grew, it
became necessary to abandon the method, and to
group the children with reference to their com
mon capacities. These groupings, however, are
based, not on ability to read and write, but upon
similarity of mental attitude and interest, and
upon general intellectual capacity and mental
alertness. There are ways in which we are still
trying to carry out the idea of mixing up the
children, that we may not build the rigid step-
ladder system of the "graded" school. One
step in this direction is having the children move
about and come in contact with different teachers.
While there are difficulties and evils connected
with this, I think one of the most useful things
in the school is that children come into intimate
relation with a number of different personalities.
The children also meet in general assemblies
for singing, and for the report of the whole
school work as read by members of the different
groups. The older children are also given a
half hour a week in which to join some of the

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 127

younger groups, and, if possible, as in hand
work, enter into the work of the younger chil
dren. In various ways we are attempting to
keep a family spirit throughout the school, and
not the feeling of isolated classes and grades.

The organization of the teaching force has
gradually become departmental, as the needs of the
work have indicated its chief branches. So we
now have recognized divisions of Science, History,
Domestic or Household Arts, Manual Training in
the limited sense (wood and metals), Music, Art
(that is, drawing, water colors, clay modeling,
etc.), and Gymnasium. As the work goes on
into the secondary period, the languages and
mathematics will also of necessity assume a more
differentiated and distinct position. As it is
sometimes said that correlated or thoroughly
harmonized work cannot be secured upon this
basis, I am happy to say that our experience
shows positively that there are no intrinsic diffi
culties. Through common devotion to the best
development of the child, through common loy
alty to the main aims and methods of the school,
our teachers have demonstrated that in educa
tion, as in business, the best organization is se
cured through proper regard for natural divi
sions of labor, interest, and training. The child
secures the advantage in discipline and knowl
edge of contact with experts in each line, while

128 THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

the individual teachers serve the common thought
in diverse ways, thus multiply ing and re-inforcing it.
Upon the moral side, that of so-called disci
pline and order, where the work of the University
Elementary School has perhaps suffered most
from misunderstanding and misrepresentation, I
shall say only that our ideal has been, and con
tinues to be, that of the best form of family life,
rather than that of a rigid graded school. In
the latter, the large number of children under
the care of a single teacher, and the very lim
ited number of modes of activity open to the
pupils, have made necessary certain fixed and
somewhat external forms of " keeping order." It
would be very stupid to copy these, under the
changed conditions of our school, its small
groups permitting and requiring the most inti
mate personal acquaintance of child and teacher,
and its great variety of forms of work, with
their differing adaptations to the needs of dif
ferent children. If we have permitted to our
children more than the usual amount of freedom,
it has not been in order to relax or decrease real
discipline, but because under our particular con
ditions larger and less artificial responsibilities
could thus be required of the children, and their
entire development of body and spirit be more
harmonious and complete. And I am confi
dent that the parents who have intrusted their

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY 129

children to us for any length of time will agree
in saying that, while the children like, or love, to
come to school, yet work, and not amusement,
has been the spirit and teaching of the school ;
and that this freedom has been granted under
such conditions of intelligent and sympathetic
oversight as to be a means of upbuilding and
strengthening character.

At the end of three years, then, we are not
afraid to say that some of our original questions
have secured affirmative answers. The increase
of our children from fifteen to almost one hun
dred, along with a practical doubling of fees, has
shown that parents are ready for a form of edu
cation that makes individual growth its sole con
trolling aim. The presence of an organized
corps of instructors demonstrates that thoroughly
educated teachers are ready to bring to elemen
tary education the same resources of training,
knowledge, and skill that have long been at the
command of higher education. The everyday
work of the school shows that children can live
in school as out of it, and yet grow daily in wis
dom, kindness, and the spirit of obedience that
learning may, even with little children, lay hold
upon the substance of truth that nourishes the
spirit, and yet the forms of knowledge be ob
served and cultivated ; and that growth may be
genuine and thorough, and yet a delight.

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Educ Dewey, John

D The School and society